Anyone who has felt the pressure of
a weeklong sinus infection won’t be
happy to hear it, but a study finds that a
commonly prescribed medicine doesn’t
clear up such attacks any better than
a placebo.

The findings, in the Feb. 15 Journal of
the American Medical Association, don’t
apply to people who have chronic sinus
infections lasting 28 days or more. But
people with trademark signs of an acute
sinus infection — yucky drainage, facial
pressure, congestion and headache for
a full week — overall fared no better with
antibiotics than did people getting inert
pills, scientists at Washington University in St. Louis report.

“This struck me as a very well-designed, -conducted and -analyzedstudy,” says James Hughes, an infectiousdisease physician at Emory Universityin Atlanta. “It adds to evidence that inmost patients with acute sinus infec-tions, antibiotics don’t add value.”The researchers randomly assigned166 adults with sinus infections to geteither amoxicillin or a placebo threetimes a day for 10 days. All patientsreceived other drugs for symptom reliefas needed. Three days after treatmentstarted, the two groups had improvedat the same pace. Seven days out,slightly more patients getting antibiot-ics reported improvement, but this edgedisappeared by day 10 when about four-fifths of each group reported “significantimprovement” in sinus infections, saysstudy coauthor Jane Garbutt, a physicianand researcher at Washington University.

James Gill, a practicing physicianwho also heads Delaware Valley Out-comes Research in Newark, Del., saysthe medical community has tried to slowthe prescribing of antibiotics for sinusinfections for years. “But I don’t thinkpractice patterns have changed much,”he says. Doctors are under pressure frompatients to do something, and offeringassurance that the symptoms are likelyto resolve in a week or so rarely satisfiesthem, Gill says.

Two cells make fly memories last Of the 100,000 nerve cells in the fruit fly brain, two have a special role in memory. Positioned on the front of the brain, one on each side, this duo of nerve cells (shown in pink) churns out proteins that are essential for fruit flies to form, store and retrieve long-term memories, Chun-Chao Chen of National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and colleagues report in the Feb. 10 Science. When the researchers prevented these two nerve cells from making proteins after a training session, the flies’ ability to remember an odor diminished. surprisingly, these two large nerve cells, called the dorsal-anterior-lateral neurons, reside outside brain regions that are typically thought of as the fruit fly’s memory centers — L-shaped structures called the mushroom bodies (shown in green). —Laura Sanders
SCIENCE/aaas